Save Your Money, Drink at Home: 7 Reasons Going Out Sucks

Fuck “going out.” In general, drinking in public is a goddamn waste. It’s expensive, annoyingly over-complicated, and rarely results in the time-of-your-life experience Bacardi commercials make it out to be. Before you know it, you and your friends are shitfaced with no way home, having dropped half your paycheck on a logistical nightmare that ends in a hangover the next morning. No thank you, I’d rather stay home.

The setting doesn’t matter, either. Nightclub, bar, restaurant — they all suck. You could point me to the chillest, quietest old man bar with the best scotch collection in the West Coast and I’d still find things wrong with it.

If you’re a crabby, prematurely old person like me who hates people and being in public in general, then you’ll recognize some of these reasons why I hate going out.

It’s expensive

Going out is not cheap. Ever. Transportation, drinks, late night munchies — a single night out can damn near bankrupt you when you live that broke asshole life.

Even conscious efforts to go out for cheap drinks wind up costing you. Pregaming to save on alcohol backfires when you spend ten bucks on a burrito at 3 a.m. Walking sounds like it’ll work at the beginning of the night, but post-burrito your roommate orders an Uber because “fuck that, I don’t care if it’s peak hours, I’m cold.”

And if you get too drunk, you wind up spending an enormous amount of money on stuff you might not even remember. Luckily, you have drunk selfies and your credit card transaction history to help jog your memory.

Comfort and looking cute are mutually exclusive

This applies year-round, but with the torrential amounts of rain the Bay Area’s received in the last weeks, this is especially true right now. As a SoCal native, I don’t own cute winter clothes. Everything I own that’s not a summer outfit is for utility purposes only. Snowbunny chic is not a look I can pull off.

The social pressure to look good when going out is immense. Donning enough coordinating, cute-looking layers to deal with being outside is great, until you get to the bar and you either have to pay for coat check or try to keep track of all your layers the entire night. Dress for comfort in the bar and you freeze your tits off on the walk there. You could say fuck it and go out in whatever, but if getting dressed up is half the fun anyway, why not just stay home?

Transportation blows

Everything about getting to and from your drinking establishment of choice is awful. Generally speaking, you have four options: secure a DD, take public transit, pay for an Uber/Lyft/Taxi, or walk.

No one wants to be the designated driver, because going out sober is so little fun, it’s negative fun. No amount of free soda in the world can make shepherding your drunk friends through their night on the town worth it.

So you pay a stranger to drive. The air of judgement permeating the first drunken Uber ride I ever took was enough to deter me from ever doing it again. But I have, and I feel that same wash of guilt every time I climb into some poor driver’s back seat. Public transit is an okay, but slightly limited option, and requires you to have cash — and more importantly, exact change — on hand.

So you’re left with walking, which, if you live more than a half mile from the bar or are trying to keep a group larger than four together, is next to impossible.

All of these things, independently, are great. What’s happening in this picture, however, should never happen in a bar.

Everyone’s boring or just trying to fuck you

Even if you’re out in a group and don’t plan on making friends, you’ll invariably have to talk to a stranger. Making small talk with other people in a bar is the wooooooorst. Chances are it’s so loud in there I can’t hear anything they’re saying, and it’s probably not even worth the effort anyway.

I don’t want to hear about your six figure salary, tech bro. No, hipster douche, I don’t care that the beer in this bar doesn’t stack up to the homebrew you and your buddies make in your studio apartment. And yeah, art major in the Doc Martens, I might feign interest, but I still cannot give a flying fuck about your edgy sci-fi novel that you think captures “the zeitgeist.” It feels like the only reason people talk to each other in bars in the first place is they’re certain they have at least a 50-50 shot of getting laid. Because fuck meeting someone just for the sake of friendship and community, right? As soon as they find out you’re taken, it’s like you’re invisible. And GOD FORBID the patrons of the straight bar I’m at find out I’m bisexual. Just sit back and watch the threesome offers from too-drunk-to-even-get-it-up dudes come flying in. Which reminds me…

WHERE DO ALL THE QUEER PEOPLE HANG OUT IN THE SOUTH BAY?

I’m serious, y’all. Where? In the four(ish) years I’ve been living here, I have been to both of the exactly two (count em, two) gay bars in downtown San Jose. No shade on Mac’s or Splash, but two bars tucked into an alley on First Street does not a thriving queer scene make.

There’s also Renegades, I hear my drag queens shout from the back, but bitch, tell me how you make a good night out when there’s nothing else around it? The walk is a solid mile and a half from the other gay bars, and there’s no direct bus line there, so that means taking an Uber. Or going to San Francisco, which is its own set of logistical nightmares. Going out for an explicitly queer experience is a financial commitment I am (usually) not willing to make. This is probably the reason above all else I’m salty about going out.

That awful moment when you finally get up to pee.

The line at the bathroom

This is often a gender-specific problem, unless you’re somewhere REALLY crowded, but uggggggggggggh having to pee at the bar suuuuuuucks. I’ve put myself in danger of getting a UTI more times than I care to remember just because I didn’t want to go to the bathroom at the place I was drinking. Not only do you have to leave your friends and possibly risk your seat getting jacked, women in general have to wait in line for at least five minutes before relieving ourselves, so if you’re like me and wait until last minute to leave the table, that wait is excruciating.

Then you finally get in there. Should you still have enough of your wits about you to take in your surroundings, you realize just how nasty bar restrooms actually are. Why is everything always dripping wet? And there’s never any toilet paper, so you have to use a seat cover, if there are any left in the holder. Sometimes I’d rather risk the UTI.

Running into your ex

This is an issue all slutty people with poor relationship skills have when living in the same city long enough. Best case scenario, you spot them across the crowded bar, you never make eye contact, and you leave feeling slightly weird. Worst-case you’re forced to interact with them and their new fling and you’re left wondering why the hell you agreed to go out in the first place. The best way to get through it is to live-tweet the experience, because nothing soothes reopened wounds like vague, angry venting on the internet.

Not all drinking in public is created equally. Tall cans in the park, trail beers while hiking, and 4th of July barbecues at the river are all cheap public drinking options. However, those all involve day drinking and some modicum of illegality. For night-time drinking, I’d rather stay home.

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